ArcGIS Pro – Page 2 – Master of Spatial Analysis

ArcPro Animation of 1923 Canoe Trip in Algonquin Park

By Sarah Medland

Geovis Course Project @RyersonGeo, SA8905, Fall 2018

Context

While searching the web for historic maps to inspire this project I came across the personal website of Bob and Diane McElroy. Their website includes an extensive personal collection of present and historic records of the natural environment within Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Park. The collection of thoughts and logs on their site consist of those of their ancestors – dating back many decades from now. The following map is a section of the one which was chosen for the purpose of this assignment. It dates back to 1921:

In July of 1923, a group of 4 men led by a guide embarked on a 12-day canoe-trip, creating a log of their route as they traveled. The map log included handwritten details by W. H. McConnell about wildlife, weather, and their experience in the Park.

Purpose:

to animate an artistic rendering of a historic canoeing route which…

– brings to life a historic map by integrating it with modern GIS technology

– reveals information from approx. a hundred years prior about an ever-popular canoeing area

Methods

To begin, the map was download as a JPEG and brought into ArcMap. A DMTI Spatial minor water bodies Shapefile was added. Using this present-day layer, labelled by lake name, it was fairly easy to align this with the lakes from the historic map. Some challenges arose as the map is from 1921 therefore its accuracy is questionable, however, I was able to geo-reference the map fairly well.

Historic Map in ArcMap where it was georeferenced to a present-day water bodies layer

Next, DEM tiles were downloaded from Scholar’s Geoportal. These were converted into a TIN using the raster to TIN tool in ArcMap, and then into TIN nodes using the TIN node tool. This allowed the tiles to be combined into one continuous TIN using the Create TIN tool which could be clipped to the extent of the map surface. Once the elevation surface was made, the map could be given height.

The map surface after it was draped over an elevated TIN surface and atmospheric effects were applied

To visualize the canoe route, a line Shapefile was created over the route drawn on the map. Campsites were also added as a point Shapefile which included a ‘Date’ field in the attribute table. In the ArcGIS Pro Global setting the map was draped over the TIN surface and campsites symbolized in 3D with the dates labelled.

An example of some of the original annotations on the map

Lastly, a animation following the canoe route was created in ArcGIS Pro. The animation was created to guide the viewer along the route of the 1923 trip and included annotations such as those above and historic pictures from the time period.

Results: The following video is the final product:

Telling a Story through a Time-series animation using Open Data

By: Brian Truong.

GeoVis Project @RyersonGEO SA8905, Fall 2018

Context

As a student and photographer, I have frequently walked around the streets of Toronto. I would often see homeless individuals in certain neighborhoods in Toronto. While at the time I was aware of some shelters across of Toronto, I never fully understood the Toronto shelter system as I thought organizations in Toronto were one and the same in terms of providing shelters to those who are at-risk. I also noticed that the City of Toronto updates their shelter occupancy data on a more less daily basis, which led me to choose this topic for my GeoViz project. My lack of knowledge of the shelter system and the readily available data, motivated me to choose to make a Time Series map along with incorporating ESRI’s Story Maps into the project. This was to ensure that whoever wanted to see my project could be told the story of Toronto Shelters as well.

Process

Toronto open data provides shelter occupancy data in multiple formations, however, a JSON data format was chosen due to previous experience with working with JSON data in Alteryx. JSON data was provided through a link from Toronto Open Data. Using Alteryx a scrip was created to download the live(ish) data, parse it, put it in a proper format, then filter the data, and along with creating appropriate columns to work with the data.

Above is an example of the JSON data that was used, the data itself is semi-structured as the data is organized in a specific format. The data consisted of multiple of entries for Shelter location, those were filtered out so that only organizational program was present for each shelter location. this usually went down too the program that housed the largest number of people. In order for a proper time series to be created, a date/time column must be present, columns were created through the use of the formula tool where columns such as date/time and occupancy rates were created.

Above is the final Alteryx strip that was used to get the data from a JSON format to a .xlsx format. However, there was one problem with the data. The data itself wasn’t geocoded, so I had to manually geocode each shelter location by running the address of each shelter through Google Maps and copy and pasting the (x and y) values of the shelter locations. These coordinates were then put into the same file as the output of the Alteryx script, except it was in a different sheet. Using VLOOKUP, shelters were assigned their coordinates through matching shelter names.

Time Series Map

The time series portion of this geoviz project was created using Arcmap Pro, the excel file was brought into ArcGIS Pro and points were created using x and y coordinates. A shapefile was created, in order to create a time series map, the time field had to be enabled. Below shows the steps needed to be taken in order to enable time as a field on a shapefile.

In order to actually enable time, a time column must already exist in the format of dd/mm/yyy XX:XX. From that point, the change in shelter occupancy could be viewed through a time-slider going at any interval that the user required. For this project, it went by a daily basis on a 3-minute loop. In order to capture it as a video and export it, the animation function was required. Within the animation tab, the tool append was used.

What the append feature does is that it follows the time series map from the first frame, which is on the first day of the time series map (Jan 1, 2018 00:00) to the last day of the time series map (Nov 11, 2018 00:00). The animation would then be created as per specifications of the settings. The video itself is exported through a 480p video at 15 frames a second. It was then uploaded on YouTube and embeded on the storymaps.

ESRI Story Maps

The decision to use ESRI’s story maps was in part due to what motivated me to work on this. I wanted to tell the story of shelters and who they serve and is affected by them. Especially after two major events in the past year that has led to shelters in Toronto showing up on the news. Both the cold snap in early 2018 and the large influx of migrants has had a huge effect on Toronto’s Shelters.

North American Impact Events throughout History – A Map Animation

By: Nicole Slattery. Geovis Project Assignment @RyersonGeo, SA8905, Fall 2018

For my Geovisualization assignment, I wanted to create an animated map of impact crater events in North America throughout history. I decided to use ArcGIS Pro in order to do this because of the nature of the data. The Earth Impact Database maintained by the Planetary and Space Science Centre (PSSC) in New Brunswick, has achieved the 190 confirmed impact craters from around the world. The impacts have occurred anywhere from 1850 million years ago to 600 000 years ago. Usually, when creating an animated map throughout time, the map software requires a date. The impacts did not occur within the span of the Gregorian calendar used today; therefore, this software cannot map this data. However, ArcGIS Pro includes a tool “Animate through a range” which allows for this data to be animated sequentially without a date.

2D Map of Impact Craters in North America

In order to utilize ArcGIS Pro’s animation through a range tool, the data points of impact craters were geocoded and added to a new map. The points were displayed by proportional symbols of their diameter on the earth in km. Therefore, the map displays the distribution of impact craters across North America by their diameter. The locations were symbolized as well, in a gradient colours brown to black, in order for the points to appear to have depth. The 2D map can be viewed above. The basemap of the map was added from the basemap gallery under the Map tab in ArcGIS Pro. The World Imagery basemap was selected; this layer presents high resolution satellite and aerial imagery of the world. Another interesting feature of ArcGIS Pro is that any 2D map can be converted to a 3D scene for data visualization. Under the View tab, the Convert button was selected. Within this drop-down menu, the option To a Global Scene was selected. This converted the map into a 3D globe.

Converting the 2D map into a Global Scene

Under Properties of the scene layer impact points, the range setting was enabled for the “Age” attribute of the layer. The age attribute describes when the impact occurred in MYA (millions of years ago). The range was set between 1850 and 0 MYA, as this is the full range of the data in the layer. A range slider was added to the side of the scene. By dragging the slider, the points animatedly appear and disappear depending on their ages.

Enabling Range on the “Age” Attribute of the Impacts

Range Slider (display at 1315 MYA)

In order to start an animation, the Add button was selected in the View tab. This created and opened an Animation tab within ArcGIS Pro. In order to start the video, the Range of visible data was selected as 1850-1850. This way only the oldest impact crater is displayed. The scene was zoomed out for the first shot of the animation. By setting the Append Time to 5 seconds and selecting Append, the first clip of animation was created. This clip was 5 seconds. In order to display the progression of impacts occurring, the slider was dragged closer throughout time. By increasing Append time to 15 seconds and selecting Append, the animation clip was created. The animation clip is range aware therefore it will progress through the range slider up to where the slider was dragged throughout this append time. This process was repeated until the whole range was animated.

Range set at 1850-1850 in order to start animation

After the range of ages of the impacts was animated, a camera path was animated in order to create an interesting visual. By zooming and changing the view of the map and using the append animation clip, a visualization of the satellite imagery of the impact craters was created. For example, the Sudbury crater was zoomed in upon and animated. Then, a paragraph of facts about the Sudbury crater was overlaid using the Overlay option in the Animation Tab. As well, a scale was overlaid using the same tool. This was done for three other craters and was added to the animation video.

Finally, the animation was exported as a MP4 file in order to easily share the file.

The Final Video seen above was uploaded to YouTube.